


You

by budgewrites



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist (Anime 2003)
Genre: Body Horror, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Mutual Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:21:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27095749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/budgewrites/pseuds/budgewrites
Summary: They're neither of them heavy sleepers.
Relationships: Lust/Scar (Fullmetal Alchemist)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	You

**Author's Note:**

> I just shat this out in a migraine induced fugue state, so please excuse any errors etc

She had been here before.

She had been here a dozen times before.

Her eyes worked, but nothing around her would fall into focus. Matted curls fell over her face. Every point where her translucent skin touched the bedsheets stung. Raw nerves that had been unraveled and corrected and rewound in an agonizing series of flashes and sparks fired off with every shift of this miserable body. 

Her spine wouldn't lie straight, no matter how she twisted. Sitting up was nearly impossible. Her knees, or what might have passed for them, would scarcely bend. She swore she had toes, but God help her, she couldn't feel anything below her ankles.

And her hands…

She had learned early on to pretend they were not even there. Every flex of her fingers struck lightning through her arms. Despite the metaphors conjured by her scattered mind, the spikes through her palms, pinning her to the wall behind this creaky cot, were very literal. She could have been a mangled insect, displayed in a paltry collection of one. Because she was definitely alone. 

Most of the time, she was terribly, unrecognizably alone. 

_ "I can't have you lashing out again." _

The old woman's mockery of maternal gentleness, the soft stroke of a withered hand on her cheek, played back with every white hot flash through her palms and up her forearms. Her fingertips dug into the wall with a force so shocking she scared herself. They rent through wood and the horsehair beneath it as if it were paper. What that meant, what actually happened when she felt some alien muscle flex under the skin of her fingers, pushing  _ out _ at her fingernails, she didn’t know. She only knew that it hurt. She only knew that all of it hurt.

The first word on her half-formed lips had been a name.

It was met with a sharp strike across her cheek.

She tried again, incapable of anything more than a whisper.

The same sound, the same smack against her face. Angry marks lingered for hours against raw skin.

She didn't try again.

In her half consciousness, the name drifted away. It did not come back.

Her ears worked.

It was raining.

But it wasn't rainy season…?

It was with that non sequitur that Lust awoke.

She wasn't in Master's mansion. There wasn't even a roof over her head. 

Breaths she didn’t truly need huffed heavily in her chest. She could feel her heart in her throat, tension in her shoulders, and that horrible telltale pressure behind her eyes that had been making itself known more and more, lately. 

"Are you awake?"

She wished she believed it, when she told herself it was the crackle of the nearby campfire that soothed the lingering fear in her chest.

Scar's voice was low. Sturdy. Perhaps the only thing warmer than the fire.

Her eyes rolled at the thought.

Lust sat up rather than offering an answer. A blanket had made its way over her at some point, in spite of the fact that it was illogical and unneeded. Her body didn't throw any heat and had no need to retain it.

Scar knew that.

She found her hands tangling in its soft folds regardless, holding onto something while her heart settled down from that wretched dream.

Nightmare?

Memory?

It was easier to look up at the stars than it was to meet the eyes of the man sitting on his own makeshift bed a respectful distance from hers. Always three or so meters away, give or take. It was such a funny little rule he enforced upon himself. And with remarkable consistency. If she set her own blankets any closer than the unwritten minimum, close enough that their fingertips might be able to bridge the gap should they reach far enough, Lust would find upon waking that Scar had eased farther away.

"You were murmuring," he continued when met with her silence. She knew him well enough by now to recognize that the observation was his way of opening the door. Inviting her to speak, if she wished. Only a month ago, she supposed she would have given into the temptation to brush him off with a sarcastic remark, but something in her had twisted. Turned a corner.

Or perhaps she was softened from having just been asleep. Rude of him to spring such an opportunity on her when she was still emerging from the fog of unconsciousness, really.

"Unpleasant dreams," she admitted quietly among the fire and the crickets and the rustle of the trees. 

"I'm sorry."

Lust carefully policed her eyes, the curve of her mouth, when something hot twisted in her chest at his condolences.

"What I get for sleeping, I suppose," she said, letting her callous coping mechanisms have their moment. But her eyes betrayed her, snapping to his in spite of her best efforts to appear fascinated by the dying fire.

"I have tried to avoid sleep," he pointed out, amicable if irritatingly literal, "The detriments vastly outweighed the lack of nightmares."

"For a human, maybe."

It was a trick of the flickering light. Or maybe Scar's aged eyes really did soften on her.

"Sleep stabilizes the mood, improves one's temperament. Even in a homunculus."

"And how would you know?" Lust perked up, incredulous. Scar dared to feign innocence with a shrug. Lust continued, "Quite a bold claim coming from sunshine incarnate."

Her facetious jab was met with a sharp exhale, the sound she knew passed for a laugh in Scar's terms. Without warning, the miserable,  _ wonderful _ heat twisting through her chest squeezed her lungs, trickled all the way to her damn toes, and Lust's mask of irritation crumbled. She lost control of her lips, and they parted into a smile so foreign she had to swallow the reflex to touch her own cheek, to check that her skin hadn't cracked like porcelain. 

Caught off his guard, Scar's eyes froze on hers. If she hadn't known better, she would have thought something had fallen from the sky and stricken him square in the chest. She usually had to  _ catch _ him staring. He would be frowning, huddled up in the corner and regarding her like she was a particularly vexing math problem. 

But right now…

Heat from the fire gleamed in his irises, danced in flashes of accentuated reds as Lust let herself hold his gaze for far too long.

The crisp air between them shifted into something thick. Something tense.

"What do you see?"

The question crept off her tongue without permission, and Lust desperately wished she could pull it back, bury it so deep that even Scar's stupid excuse for a laugh and his brilliant, dark eyes wouldn't have been able to reach into her ribcage and yank it out of her. But she was a blind woman stumbling onto a minefield of her own free will, all of her reconstructed nerves spilling out in front of this human, and for what? Because he had acknowledged her pain? Half-chuckled at her poor, defensive excuse for humor?

It wasn't her fault. The warmth that had grown and simmered in Lust (like lava? Like a sickness? Like a meadow bursting to life under the rain at a drought's end?) was suddenly too much to hold. It spilled out from her in what they both knew was a question with no happy answer. Maybe even no  _ true  _ answer.

_ What do you see? _

Lust recalled the memory from her dreams, her half-formed inhuman self, a live wire of delicate flesh and a fragile mind. Now here she was, asking once again to be slapped across her pretty face, to be yanked back to solid ground hard enough that maybe, this time, she would stay there. In her place.

"You."

Her steady, quiet heart leapt into her throat, hummed in her ears with his one word response. She wondered, among her rapidly scattering thoughts, if a human would have even been able to hear him. It was a remarkably simple answer, one Lust could have taken for a cop-out were it not for the lingering, gentle weight of Scar's eyes on her. Her fingers twisted in the blanket still sitting in her lap, the blanket he had laid on her even though she didn't need it ( _ She didn't need it! _ ). 

It was too much, she told herself, like a diver coming to the surface too fast. Lust opened her mouth to speak, but she tripped on her tongue, and maybe it was for the best. There weren't any words in the heady fog that had settled her mind. Her most coherent thought was some kind of wonderment, as frightening and unfamiliar as the smile that had threatened to crack her face in two and had thrown Scar into a trance.

_ You. _

His exhaled response echoed through her like her mind was a canyon. It very well could have been, for all the empty space yawning where her coherent thoughts had once lain. She didn’t have the fortitude to examine why it mattered so damn much. Not right now. Not tonight.

Lust's feet made up her mind for her. She gathered her two blankets, one for the ground, one for the heat she didn't have, and ambled across the no-man's-land that gaped between them, that mocked her every night as he quietly snored.

The protests she steeled herself for didn’t come. Lust spread her blanket flush to Scar's, and she left no room for misinterpretation as she settled down beside him. She didn’t dare meet his eyes again. She imagined it would be something like staring into the sun. Too bright. Too important. So frightfully real that she would only hurt herself.

He didn't speak again, didn't move to lie down just yet. She was thankful for that.

Lust closed her eyes. The crackle of the fire. The chirping of crickets. The rustle of the trees. Now, curled so close by his side, the steady draws of Scar's breath. The scent of him on the blanket beside her, occupying the chasm left behind by her better sense.

And some time later, through the veil between wakefulness and kinder dreams, calloused fingers in her hair. A touch so tentative he could deny it, come morning. She would let him.


End file.
